The best way to know the self is feeling oneself at the moments of reckoning. The feeling of being alone, just with your senses, may lead you to think more consciously. More and more of such moments may sensitize ‘you towards you’, towards others. We become regular with introspection and retrospection. We get ‘the’ gradual connect to the higher self we may name Spirituality or God or just a Humane Conscious. We tend to get a rhythm again in life. We need to learn the art of being lonely in crowd while being part of the crowd. A multitude of loneliness in mosaic of relations! One needs to feel it severally, with conscience, before making it a way of life. One needs to live several such lonely moments. One needs to live severallyalone.

Thursday 24 January 2013

CONTRADICTIONS IN THE JAIPUR SPEECH BY THE CONGRESS PARTY VICE-PRESIDENT RAHUL GANDHI (II)

Since 2004, the Congress party is in government and Manmohan Singh is the prime-minister but the world knows the real power lies with Sonia Gandhi. So if we add these 8 years to the 38 years, we find that the country has been under the rule of Nehru-Gandhi family for 46 years out of its 65 years of Independence.

Lal Bahadur Shastri who was prime-minister from 1964-1966 after Nehru’s death, though seen as a person of probity, was seen as a Nehru loyalist and was chosen to corner Morarji Desai. At that time, Indira Gandhi was just beginning her journey to the political centrestage of the country.  

1991-1996, when PV Narasimha Rao was the prime-minister, there was no one from the Nehru-Gandhi family to take the political centrestage of the country so we cannot say it was the internal democracy of the Congress party that chose Mr. Rao as the prime-minister of the country.

So, no true mass leader, not from the Nehru-Gandhi family or independent of the patronage of Nehru-Gandhi family, could emerge in the Congress party to reach to the political top when there was a name from the family in the active politics and ‘circumstantially’ fit to take the prime-ministerial chair.

And still, it is the same old story.

Now do we call that an element of democracy Mr. Rahul Gandhi?

It is this culture of absolutely centralized political parties in India that has marginalized the prime entity of a democracy in the country – which you, your party and your prime minister of the moment call as the ‘aam aadmi’.

The giants that you speak of like Patel, Azad were the making of the pre-Independence days. Why can’t the Congress party produce such giants in the post-Independence phase who were (and who are) not from the Nehru-Gandhi family?

How can we say it a democratic decentralization of power?

Congress party has become a family where the authority has narrowed down to the realm of the Gandhi clan (the Sonia family). Yes, everyone can become member of this family, but the person needs to follow the dictum that the ‘top’ is reserved for the Gandhi clan.

Manmohan Singh was never a prime-ministerial material and he was chosen for being a yes-man. He has performed the assignment given to him dutifully. There is no other political giant in the country from the Congress party including you.

What separates you from others in your party is your inheritance, the legacy of the Nehru-Gandhi family and the Gandhi surname.

There are many in your party and the larger political fraternity who have spent decades in politics and yet are not seen as suitable prime-ministerial material. How do you qualify with just 8 years in active politics then?

The fact is, there is no one in the Congress party qualified enough to become the prime-minister of the country at the moment. The party does need to focus on the leadership development but needs to reform the process.

When the political top is so centralized and narrowed down to very few ‘political elite’, it is foolhardy to expect that an ‘aam aadmi’ would be allowed to participated in the political process and grow in stature.

How should we read this element of contradiction in your speech Mr. Rahul Gandhi?

The need is to have its unorthodox side, away from the Congress party legacy, the upper hand but the ground reality favours the worn-out line.

©/IPR: Santosh Chaubey - http://severallyalone.blogspot.com/